At Wells I did speak to Alan of ModelU about them and sent him an example with a view to seeing if he could 3D print them, either off the casting or from the drawings in Southern Nouveau; I haven't heard back but I guess he is inundated with other potential products. Might be worth you dropping him a line though.

“There are different materials that it can be printed in, the default is PA12 so you may need to change the material for the cheaper versatile plastic but I understand that the holes never came out with that material?

There is also an Updated Southern Region Lineside Concrete Fencing.It is the same as the above but has holes in every post.There is only one material for that model which is PA12, hopefully so the holes are printed [higher resolution material]”

Douglas passed the rights for the fence posts and the disc signals to me.I am surprised that Slaters said that they knew nothing as we had some correspondence about these just after he died.

Of the fence posts I have few bits of frets, but mainly the centre posts. (Quite a lot of centre posts)More importantly I have the original tooling.

I have been asked to do another run, but have not had chance to go into this due to work etc. I am also not sure how much demand there is.As for material, I did consider white-metal as did Doug, however these proved to be too weak so brass is the preferred choice.

It was also suggested that I supply the wire as well. But you have to buy an awful lot of that and also in the right colour. Brown or white? As there appears to be demand I will put a bit more action into pressing ahead with this. If anyone wants to express an interest in quantities or colour of wire then let me know.

Before seeing this thread I had never been aware that these fencing components had been manufactured in 4mm scale - obviously I never saw the relevant MRJ article!

If cast in brass then in principle I would be interested in acquiring a quantity, if the price is right. This thread has prompted me to research the fencing for our Burnham layout, leading to the conclusion that we have frightening number of fenceposts to instal. The photograph below suggests that the boundary fencing consisted of posts with the same pitch distance as that between the harps of standard Southern harp-and-panel platform facing; i.e. four feet. Fencing at this pitch extended along the full length of the excursion platform and beyond, yet at the west end of the station there was another length of post-and-wire fencing where the pitch between posts appears to have been between 14'-16'. So there seems to have been quite a lot of variation in the interval between posts.

For wire, I would be inclined to use 0.08-0.10 mm monofilament fishing line, or omit the wire altogether.

As previously mentioned in above posts , i have produced a 3d CAD file which can be printed in a variety of materials.

The original version had witness marks on the posts to assist in positioning the wire between the post as pictured below.

In a silly bid to get totally authentic i then adapted the corner and intermediate post to accept a wire by replacing the witness marks with 0.15mm holes, as shown below.

I'm not sure of my thought process as trying to thread eazyline through the holes would drive you to drink!

The sprues are made up of 2x corner posts , 2 x intermediate posts 2x end posts and 24x bay posts.There are enough posts to make a run 552mm long ( 138 scale feet) if the nominal 6ft spacing between bay posts is used.

To reduce the cost of printing, i have made these customable by contacting me, i can then upload a file with the quantities you require. Part of the pricing of the printing company is a setup cost which is applied to each item even if it is a multiple purchase of the same item, by redesigning the sprue you only pay one setup cost.

Since the club purchased these, Shapeways have made many advances in the material they offer.In the "plastic" range the introduction of Acurra Xtreme and Accura 200 which have very good and excellent (respectively) strength properties and good surface finish properties.

EDIT: 08/12/19 - Sorry my mistake Acurra Xtreme and Acurra 200 are not available through the Shapeways shop, they are only available to the designer, this may change with time

The model can also be printed in metals, but the draw back is cost.

As with most models that are printed, one option is to purchase "a master" of the best resolution available and then go down the casting route to offset the cost. This however is extremely time consuming and with investment casting a lot of specialist tooling is needed.

Mark

Last edited by Mark-Leigh on Sun Dec 08, 2019 5:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

Mark-Leigh wrote:I'm not sure of my thought process as trying to thread eazyline through the holes would drive you to drink

When I have wanted fencing of a similar style,but only a short run I have used 0.3mm brass wire to represent the fence wire used. Overscale of course but it makes threading the wire a lot easier and the end product is more robust. For the useful product that Mark has produced the holes would need to be enlarged.

Mark-Leigh wrote:I'm not sure of my thought process as trying to thread eazyline through the holes would drive you to drink

When I have wanted fencing of a similar style,but only a short run I have used 0.3mm brass wire to represent the fence wire used. Overscale of course but it makes threading the wire a lot easier and the end product is more robust. For the useful product that Mark has produced the holes would need to be enlarged.

Terry Bendall

Of course you do realise that the wire isn't supposed to go through the holes in the fence posts.

Brightspark wrote:Of course you do realise that the wire isn't supposed to go through the holes in the fence posts.

True but as I remember it, the main wire was held in place by a short piece of wire that did pass through the post and was then bent round the main wire either side of post. Modelling that would be fun too.

Originally, the wire did go through the intermediate posts but I suspect that problems emerged quite quickly, at a guess slight movement of the wire (wind, temperature changes) caused the galvanising to be abraided and as a result the wire rusted quickly. Later installations, early/mid-1930s onwards perhaps, had the intermediate posts turned so that the holes were orthogonal to the track and a split-pin like arrangement was used to hold the wires close to, but not touching, the post. With this arrangement the wires always ran on the side of the posts furthest from the track so that beasts leaning against the wire wouldn't pull the fixing out of the posts.

On this last point, it is worth noting that the earlier standard SR "concrete" cattle docks had their timber horizontals fixed to the outside of the posts but that by the early 1930s new installations had them on the inside, doubtless for the same reason.

Finally, when we built Bembridge, half-a-century ago now, there was a short length of post and wire fencing (and a gate) at the front of the layout (which, by chance, were still in situ on the prototype at that time). We discovered by experiment that at normal model viewing distances it wasn't actually possible to see scale size wire so it was omitted, the "split-pin" fixings were effectively modelled though by minuscule ink marks.